As President Donald J. Trump wraps up his first official trip abroad, the rest of the world is watching the U.S. No matter who is in the White House, it is important — imperative, even — that our allies trust that American leadership, driven by an unshakeable set of core values, is a constant.
As a 20-year veteran of the State Department, I was struck by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent comments that questioned the importance of core values to this administration when making foreign policy. “I make a distinction between values and policy,” Tillerson said recently on “Meet the Press”, defending his remarks to State Department staff earlier in May, when he stated conditioning America’s national security efforts on insisting other countries adopt our values “really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”
Tillerson’s remarks reminded me of the views promoted by Jeane Kirkpatrick, ambassador to the United Nations under Ronald Reagan. Kirkpatrick drew a distinction between totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Bloc, and authoritarian regimes. She advocated more lenient treatment of pro-Western authoritarian states, on the premise that they would then be more amenable to gradual reform. While that view has since come under sharp criticism from historians, the Trump administration’s embrace of strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Rodrigo Duterte raises concerns that we could be returning to this former approach to foreign policy.
Trump’s current trip abroad, along with recent meetings in Washington with strongmen Erdogan of Turkey and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi from Egypt, has drawn a sharp distinction with the policy of former president Barack Obama.
With years of experience promoting U.S. interests overseas, I strongly believe it is possible to promote and defend our core values without “lecturing” or “chastising.” If we hope to maintain our status as world leaders, it is essential that we do so. Human rights are not just American values. They are universal, as noted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those values and our foreign policy are inextricably intertwined, and I believe that a foreign policy that fails to promote those values would ultimately make the US, and the world, less safe. Contrary to Tillerson’s statement, it is impossible to advance our national security and economic interests without also promoting our values.
As Sen. John McCain recently noted in a New York Times op-ed, “We have long believed moral concerns must be an essential part of our foreign policy, not a departure from it.”
It is not the role of the U.S. to dictate what type of government any other country should have, nor should it be. But it is essential that we, as global leaders, unapologetically promote human rights, citizen participation and citizen engagement. As a diplomat, I witnessed what can happen when we fail to engage civil society, our failed reconciliation and reconstruction in Iraq being a glaring example. And now, as the president of an international faith-based humanitarian organization, I see again and again at the grass roots how the faith-based teaching on upholding human dignity that cuts across religions is an essential ingredient to lasting peace and sustainable development.
A foreign policy devoid of the core value of promoting human rights and human dignity would also make our work as nongovernmental organizations working abroad more difficult and less safe. The victims of human rights violations are often the very people we serve — those most vulnerable to social and economic exclusion. Regimes that abuse human rights with impunity may suppress information critical to humanitarian response to epidemics and droughts, so the number of people needing humanitarian assistance is likely to increase, along with a rise in those displaced from their homes. The number of people vulnerable to radicalization may also increase. The world is likely to become less stable, not more so.
A “Great America” will always be an America that takes a leading and uncompromising role in promoting values of human rights and human dignity. In doing so, we will be acting in the interests not only of all who are oppressed, assuring them that America remains a beacon of hope, but also in our own long-term economic and national security interests.
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Keep America Great? Promote Human Rights originally appeared on usnews.com
